FNB online banking woes continue

Went to FNB a short while ago and the bank is closed. Big notice on the doors that they are suffering from a national banking system failure. long line of idiots standing outside the bank hoping they will open :D
 
Sinbad said:
Security hole? You can't make the payment. What hole?
Systems are being moved to DR at the moment.
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No OTP sent when setting up a new payment recipient is a security hole.
 
erb said:
No OTP sent when setting up a new payment recipient is a security hole.
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I couldn't even set up a beneficiary. No Add Recipient link anywhere...?
 
erb said:
I needed to make a One time payment.
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The OTP doesn't go through without a pin. little error in red at the bottom of the screen. I am trying to do the same.
 
dequadin said:
Surely Prod and backup run on independent power sources? Otherwise they're not redundant?
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I think the problem occurred further upstream, before power distribution in the building. In South Africa we unfortunately don't have multiple true independent power distributors so as far as I understand we cannot build true Tier 4 data centers in this country. I also think people thought that generators and UPS will deal with power failure and spikes and that is why they didn't run in special power from different sections of the Eskom network like they do for smelters - as this is very very expensive (they will have to do dedicated cables for FNB through the city).

Even now, I think the solution is to get electric engineers to look at their current power system and just make it more robust.

But this is a fringe event. I would liken it to the "ThePlanet.com" event where they had dual everything but were not allowed to switch it on by the fire department due to fire risk. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9092158/Explosion_has_data_center_scrambling_users_venting
 
Not all functionality is available on the Online Banking site. That kinda sucks. Now I have to walk to a shop to buy my lotto :cry:
 
Was able to make a one time payment now, but was met with a message saying
Transaction in progress.
Please check your history for the transaction result.
This may take a few minutes to reflect.
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McT said:
Possibly the surge they experienced in Randburg on Tuesday?
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Negative. You get High Voltage, Medium Voltage and Low Voltage when it comes to power delivery. If you have a hell of a lot of power usage, like you would with a large data centre, you need to either have really thick cables to cope with the high current, or you can run it at a higher voltage using thinner cables, and step it down using transformers on-site. Their substation's transformers dealing with the stepping down of the 11kV to 400V or whatever DC's run on, probably went wrong somehow and shorted. That's a lot of juice to protect against and a fuse or two won't really cut it, so it's no surprise that their UPS blew, as that acts as a filter between city power and the equipment.
 
Got this mail a few minutes ago from FNB.

FNB banking system interruptions

22 March 2012

I would like to personally extend my sincere apologies for the delays and unavailability of banking services experienced, over the last two days.

As you may now be aware, we experienced a massive power surge in our data centre on Tuesday, 20 March 2012, which resulted in the interruption of our banking systems.

Indications suggest that this surge was in the range of 12 000 kVA, which is equivalent to eight times the strength of a typical lightning strike.

FNB regularly tests the integrity of its banking infrastructure, however this scenario was so severe and unprecedented, that it could not have been foreseen.

During the course of the evening of 20 March 2012, banking services were progressively restored from 21h00 onwards.

Early this morning, we experienced latent problems resulting from the massive power surge. In order to maintain the availability and prevent any further loss of our banking services, we moved to our alternate back-up systems.

I am pleased to confirm that all our systems are now up and fully operational. All branch hours will also be extended by an hour today to help customers who were inconvenienced.

I would like to thank you for your understanding, and wish to assure you that we are, to the best of our ability, taking every measure to ensure that such events do not reoccur.

Yours sincerely,

Michael


I still cannot access my online banking....ie: I cannot reset my password and get into my account. Its still not operational
 
All the banks use failover clusters for high availability, the dr sites will always be at a different geographical location to the primary site, and will usually be a manual change over. I think all the banks would be impacted the same in similar situations, but I do believe nedbank has the best dr planning.
 
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